Self's Deception by Bernhard Schlink

Gerhard Self, the dour private detective, returns in this riveting crime novel about terrorism, governmental cover-up, and the treacherous waters where they mix.

Leo Salger, the daughter of a powerful Bonn bureaucrat, is missing, and Self has been hired to find her. His investigation initially leads him to a psych ward at a local hospital, where he is made to believe that Leo fell from a window and died. Self soon discovers, however, that Leo is alive and well and that she was involved in a terrorist incident the government is feverishly trying to keep under wraps. The result is a wildly entertaining, superbly nuanced thriller that follows one detective’s desire to uncover the truth, wherever it may lead.

Kirkus Reviews

The story of her death rings so patently untrue—no relatives have been notified, there’s been no inquiry into the details of the accident, nobody else in the hospital knows that it even happened—that Self keeps digging, and all too soon realizes he’s dug entirely too far.

The New York Times

I saw a matinee of a movie in which at first she loved him but he didnt love her, and then he loved her but she didnt love him, and then nobody loved anybody, until finally, after a chance meeting years later, he loved her and she loved him.
If I dwell on the peripheral pleasures of Selfs De...

Book Geeks

Self’s Deception, like Self’s Punishment before it and Self’s Murder due in 2009, are translations of pre-The Reader books and their early genesis shows, as neither really fit with the glorious chaos that is modern crime fiction.